I'm
an old Hoosier, born on Oct. 19, 1947, in
Fort
Wayne, IN—a good place, as a friend once said, to be from.
Indeed, I
was so eager to be From Fort Wayne that I joined the Army in my youth,
when I was a nursing student in a Catholic hospital school. I was
anti-war, a coffee-house singer of
protest songs, so the move was incongruous, perhaps even idiotic. But
I loved irony, and I was really naive; I believed the recruiting
sergeant,
who told me there was a "waiting list a mile long" for nurses who
actually wanted to go to Viet Nam. No, I would spend my two-year hitch
far from harm, lying in the Hawaiian surf or riding the Arizona desert
on a horse with no name.

My
first book is a fiction riff on the year-and-a-month I spent as a
combat operating room nurse in Viet Nam. It's titled
"Don't Mean Nothing."

I've
lived in South America, Maine, spent a brief sojourn in Chicago, lived
24 years in Eastern Massachusetts—where
I fell in love
with the Red
Sox—and currently reside
in Brooklyn, where I must keep my love under
wraps. I
spend my days writing, bicycling, traveling, co-editing a lovely little
magazine (Vestal
Review), making beaded jewelry, taking long walks
and pushing my pacifist agenda.